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can be part
of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To
illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that
often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and
possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of
rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to
determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is
not suggesting that the differences between “things” is meaningless. He merely
wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the
holomovement into “things” is always an abstraction, a way of making those
aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct
this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement “things,” he
prefers to call them “relatively independent subtotalities.”
    Indeed, Bohm believes
that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic
interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not
only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we
believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the
whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be
concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our
society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the
problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues
passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only
doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.
    Consciousness as
a More Subtle Form of Matter
    In addition to
explaining why quantum physicists find so many examples of interconnectedness
when they plumb the depths of matter, Bohm's holographic universe explains many
other puzzles. One is the effect consciousness seems to have on the subatomic
world. As we have seen, Bohm rejects the idea that particles don't exist until they
are observed. But he is not in principle against trying to bring consciousness
and physics together. He simply feels that most physicists go about it the
wrong way, by once again trying to fragment reality and saying that one
separate thing, consciousness, interacts with another separate thing, a
subatomic particle.
    Because all such things
are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of
consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer is the
observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results,
the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory. In fact, Bohm
believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for
any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep
in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of
enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess
some of the traits of living things. As Bohm puts it, “The ability of form to
be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something
that is mindlike already with the electron.”
    Similarly, he believes
that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no
meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life,
too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. Even a rock is in
some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in
all of matter, but in “energy,” “space,” “time,” “the fabric of the entire
universe,” and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and
mistakenly view as separate things.
    The idea that
consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded
throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every
portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the
universe